A new elite

Peter’s Russia still had old names, old estates and old memories of who had stood nearest the throne. What he announced as doctrine was different: service was to outweigh pedigree. A man might be born to a famous house and still be nobody if he would not learn, drill, sail or sit in an office. A man of obscure birth might rise if the tsar found him useful. The doctrine was never a clean fact on the ground. Birth still opened doors; marriage still conferred privilege at court; families still clustered around favours. Yet the official story changed, and with it the fear and the hope of a generation.

This chapter is about that story: the Table of Ranks, the new men, the foreign specialists Peter invited as a programme, the assemblies that taught Western manners in public, and an Academy of Sciences signed into being at the end of the reign. It is not about the beard as a tax, which belongs with the machinery of reform. It is not about the tsarevich Alexis, whose conflict with his father belongs with the cost. It is about who was told they could belong to the future, and who was told that ancestry had ceased to be enough. Honour, in this official language, was something you did, then wore. Pedigree became a starting advantage, not a finished argument.

On paper, a pedigree without service was a wasted name. The state would honour work it could measure, and it would measure that work in ranks. Friendship still made favourites. The Table was how favour was supposed to look like law. That was the official face of the wager.

On 24 January 1722 Peter issued the Table of Ranks, the табель о рангах, classifying grades in the military, naval and civil services into a hierarchy of fourteen categories. Promotion was to rest on personal ability and performance rather than on birth and genealogy. Anyone who attained the eighth rank received the status of a hereditary noble. Factory owners and others who had risen to officer’s rank could accede to the nobility, which thus received new blood. The Table, with minor changes, lasted until 1917. It did not abolish families. It told them that ancestry would no longer be, by itself, a hereditary right to high office. That sentence was enough to cause dissatisfaction among the old aristocracy, which lost its exclusiveness even when it kept its acres. A rank was now a public fact a clerk could check. A grandfather’s fame was not.

Who gained? Officers who survived campaigns and still had health enough for a desk. Clerks who mastered the new regulations. Foreign specialists whose skills the tsar would not wait to grow at home. Manufacturers who could supply an army and a navy. Commoners who reached the eighth civil rank, or officer’s rank, and could legally call their children noble. The Table was intended to make the existing nobility perform more efficiently as well as to recruit outsiders. It endorsed the idea of nobles as natural leaders while changing the door by which leadership was recognised. A boyar past, in this scheme, was a beginning, not a certificate for life. Peter’s gift as a ruler, on this point, was the ability to pick collaborators from the foremost families and from far lower levels of society, and to make both groups stand in the same numbered line.

Who was humiliated? Houses that had treated proximity to the throne as an inheritance. Men who knew liturgy, hunting and kinship better than fortification or book-keeping, and who now found themselves graded like lieutenants. The predominance of the boyars ended as a system, even where boyar descendants still served. Humiliation is not the same as ruin. Many old families learned the new drill, took Western coats, and kept their lands. What they lost was the right to say that birth alone made them necessary. For a proud caste, that loss was the insult inside the reform. A prince could still be a prince. He could no longer assume that the Table would wait for him.

The sheet shown here is a 1722 manuscript of the Table itself: a working list of civil, military and court grades in chancery hand, not a later textbook diagram. Columns make the doctrine look tidy. Tidy paper is not the same as a quiet aristocracy. Read the ranks as a clerk would have read them. Do not mistake a later printed copy for this one, and do not mistake this one for a photograph of anyone’s promotion.

The extreme case of a new man was Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov. He was of humble origin: an orderly for Peter from 1686, soon the tsar’s favourite, a gifted general and administrator who rose to field marshal and prince, and for a time the most powerful official in the empire. Popular stories make him a baker’s son or a street vendor of pies. Treat those origin tales cautiously. They are the shape a later public liked to give to an uncomfortable truth: that a man not born to the old houses could stand nearer the throne than they did. His greed was not a legend. As an administrator after 1714 he was under almost continuous investigation for corrupt practices; indispensable ability postponed a fall that ambition and rapacity were already preparing.

The portrait that opens this chapter is of the period: Michiel van Musscher painted Menshikov in Holland in 1698, during the Grand Embassy, already dressed as a European grandee. It does not settle the argument about a Moscow pie stall, and it does not show the investigations that followed him through the later years of the reign. A likeness can make a favourite look inevitable. The Table of Ranks was written because such rises were not supposed to depend on a single friendship, even when, in Menshikov’s case, they still did. The portrait is a claim. The investigations are the other half of the record.

Foreign specialists were not a leftover of Alexis’s German Quarter, which has its own chapter. They were Peter’s programme. He engaged experts on his travels, invited others to Russia, and used them to teach shipbuilding, gunnery, medicine, architecture, mining and the manners of offices he had seen abroad. Russians were sent west to learn, often at the state’s expense, and sometimes under compulsion. In many cases compulsory service was preceded by compulsory education for it, because a rank without skill was only another kind of pedigree. Translation of useful books was promoted for the same reason: a manual in Russian was a specialist who could be copied. The point was not to turn Moscow into Amsterdam. It was to buy time: skills imported faster than a generation could be raised. Foreigners could be envied, dismissed, or kept behind a social fence. They could also become the men without whom a college, a shipyard or a regiment would not work. Dependence was the price of speed.

Manners were part of the same speed. Peter ordered Western dress for the service world and required a new public sociability in which men and women appeared together, ate, drank and danced in ways that broke the older seclusion of elite women. Assemblies — commanded gatherings rather than private whims — were the theatre of that change. A noblewoman might be ordered from a sheltered household into a room of mixed company, displayed in Western dress. Some later writers have called this an emancipation. It is doubtful whether that was how it felt to the people marched into the experiment. Western manners here were a duty, like a uniform. To refuse them was to refuse the elite Peter was assembling. A man who would not dance, in this world, was not merely shy. He was out of rank.

Stanisław Chlebowski painted an assembly under Peter in 1858. It is later costume theatre: a crowded floor, European coats, the shock of mixed company arranged for a nineteenth-century viewer. Use it as an argument about what the new elite was supposed to look like, not as a guest list from any one evening, and not as proof that ease arrived with the first dance. Commanded pleasure is still a command.

At the end of the reign Peter turned the same appetite towards knowledge that could be housed. In 1724 he signed the project for an Academy of Sciences; the institution was instituted that year. It opened in 1725, after his death, and was at first staffed by foreign scholars. The delay matters. The Academy is often listed among Peter’s achievements as if he had lived to hear the first paper. He did not. He left a plan, a decree and a habit of hiring minds from elsewhere. His widow’s government opened the doors. A new elite of learning, like the new elite of rank, began as an import with a Russian address. That was consistent with the whole programme: found the institution first, grow the natives later, and do not wait for a Russian professor to appear by courtesy of an old family tree.

Service was to make nobility, and nobility was to mean service.

Taken together, the Table, the favourites, the foreigners, the assemblies and the Academy describe a social wager. Russia would remain a country of landlords and bound peasants. The people at the top would be those who could serve a westernising autocracy in war, office, manufacture or science. Some old families made that turn and prospered; Peter did not govern only through upstarts, and it is a misconception to imagine that he did. Some new men became princes and then, like Menshikov after Peter, discovered that a ladder can be climbed down. The humiliation of the old names and the glittering of the new ones were two halves of one policy. Both halves needed the Table, because the Table was how the state explained a rise that friendship alone made look arbitrary. A favourite without a rank was a rumour. A rank without a favourite was, at last, a career.

What the policy could not do was make everyone believe it. A rank on a table is not the same as respect at a wedding. A foreign professor is not the same as a Russian pupil ready to replace him. An assembly can command presence and still not command ease. The new elite was real enough to last, in altered form, until the empire’s end. It was also thin: a crust of service over a country that still counted souls for tax and men for life in the army. Menshikov’s rise showed how far a new man could travel. The old houses’ resentment showed how little the travel was loved. The next chapter is about that price. This one is about the people who, for a season, looked like the future the Table had drawn, and about the older houses who had to learn that looking like the past was no longer a career.